(Photograph: Angela Wylie) Over much of the past 15 years or so, I imagined I had developed two main ‘streams’ of storytelling expertise and networks. One could be broadly categorised as human rights, encompassing stories on health, disease, women and children, aid and development; the other was on climate science, often tracking scientists to their field sites to record the epic adventure tales of data gathering and discovery. Gradually I came to realise that these two streams had merged, and that the entangled realities of climate and society needed to be recognised. Over the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to be able to circle back, to draw on more than a decade of reporting in both spheres to produce long essays that connect some of the dots. One was this long piece of reportage for The Monthly exploring issues of climate impacts and climate justice. The other was this piece for Griffith Review – Buried Treasure: A Journey Into Deep Time. Its foundations date back to my first trip to Antarctica in 2007/8, when I joined a couple of glaciologists digging up an ice core at Law Dome. That first story ran in Good Weekend way back in 2008, and anticipates Australia’s quest for oldest ice which finally became a reality in January 2023: ‘Antarctica unseen by humanity even 200 years ago, divines our future and archives our past. It matters to people as never before … The ice core I helped bore and bag, catalogued with my initials, will soon be translated into data, turned into graphs, and plugged into climate models. It will have a bit part somewhere in the most important dialogue of our time, the debate on how our planet is changing and what might be done about it.’ – Ice Diaries, Good Weekend (8/3/08) https://www.dropbox.com/s/jgeko47wtwdqk6d/GoodWeekendAntarctica.pdf

– FOR SELECTED STORIES ON CLIMATE CHANGE, visit the “Climate & Science” tab.